The KDevelop team would like to announce the availability of KDevelop 3.0 Alpha 2, codenamed Gideon (screenshot). This release fixes many bugs since Alpha 1 was released over a month ago and adds a few minor features to the mix. Users of KDevelop 2.x will notice substantial improvements and are encouraged to begin upgrading so that new bugs can be identified and squashed. Both 2.x and 3.0 should work along side each other. See the KDevelop web site or the previous dot article for more information.

Comments

Having used the alpha 1 release for the past month, I just want to say that Gideon is a big step forward for KDevelop. The project has come a long way. All of you who have worked to make this possible should be really proud.

yeah.. it was. Last I heard 3.1 RC4 packages were made and they were waiting for the ok to call it final. Gentoo already has 3.1 final ebuilds available but unfortunately no source packages on the servers yet. My guess is that RC4 was ok'ed and everyone is in the process of tagging it in cvs, packaging, sending to packagers etc. and the announcement will come next week.

I unmasked all the 3.1 entries in my profile, but it still fails on not being able to find the QT it needs even if I unmask *all* the QT entries in my profile. So there's still a bit to be done there, but yes, you're still basically right, Gentoo's ready to go with this! :-)

Yes, it was due some time ago. But I'm quite relieved they didn't stick to the schedule.

The KDE compile I tried (rc4, with additional patches, on Debian unstable) was *buggy*. I identified and reported four showstopper bugs within half an hour of browsing around in the default configuration (seperate user account, empty .kde directory). Two of those have been fixed by now.

For example, kfontconfig crashes on Apply when you use ISO8859-15 fonts. The Kicker panel cannot span over multiple screens in Xinerama setups. And a couple others.
Those are probably the bugs that perhaps a KDE developer can never find because he/she doesn't have multiple monitors. But as soon as the release is out, the number of users increases a thousandfold, and there WILL be people who will be really crossed by this kind of bug.

I'm just now beginning to learn C++ (and KDE development, where KDevelop was a *HUGE* help - thank you to all kdevelop developers!) and I'll be able to do more detailed reporting and perhaps even fixing bugs soon.

I urge everybody to try the RC5 release (it's in CVS and will probably appear in FTP sites soon), so that bugs that weren't found by the developers can be fixed BEFORE the release is out. That's the whole idea of RC releases.

Who actually codes with the text looking like that? That looks like garbage. How long will it take before people realize the importance of hinting? I hate to rant but seeing that screenshot and reading the latest comments on FreeType.org (they downplay hinting), it pains me to think that people using Xfree are going to strain their eyes with the excessive use of AA. The fact of the matter is that screen resolution has hit it's peek and is not going to change from 72-100 dpi for a /very/ long time so the importance of having bitmapped raster fonts for low resolution screen reading cannot be understated.

FreeType reasons that a lot of available fonts aren't properly hinted (tuned) for screen display, which is true, but the majority of fonts available, especially free fonts, are for graphics and print use. Not screen display. It just has to be accepted that screen fonts are just hard to make and thus there aren't too many out there. But that doesn't mean hinting /shouldn't/ be supported. People normally only use about three fonts on their computers (Arial, Times New Roman, Courier New) and two if they're using default KDE setup (Helvetica, Courier). Licensing issues are a bummer but that's business. Besides the distros, if already paying for AcroRead, RealPlayer, StarOffice, etc. should be able to pony up the cash to legally turn the bytecode interpreter on. I just leave AA off at the moment.

Hm. I use a 133 DPI display (one of those high-res LCDs) and everything looks just peachy lightly hinted like that! I can stare at text for hours a day and it's like reading a piece of paper. Hinted, the fonts are illegible because they're so damn narrow.

The people at Freetype are most definitely NOT downplaying the importance of hinting. They are quite concerned with hinting. Because of the $*#@% apple patents on truetype bytecode, they can't enable the truetype bytecode interpreter. Distros could and should, but for some reason many haven't. In the absence of that, they have been working diligently on improving the auto-hinter. With the new Freetype version, they have toned down the autohinter to generate glyphs that are more correct (have the same proportions as the font designer intended) instead of distorting them. This produces more consistent-looking text. Also, they have fixed the bugs that caused the slanted parts of letters like 's' to disappear like in the article screenshot. They have also added a way for applications to specify what type of device they want the output optimized for (default, LCD, monochrome, etc). Unfortunately this change is not backwards-compatible so fonts may not be optimized for LCDs until applications are changed (QT 3.1 is changed).

If you look at the Freetype mailing list, you will see that several people are hard at work tweaking the autohinter in various ways. The rendering quality of Freetype is only going to improve. If you want the bytecode interpreter enabled, email your distro, or compile freetype yourself (it isn't that hard).

I have enabled the Bytecode Interpreter and compiled, and even installed the rpm available for my distro, and it looks sharper, but the fonts don't look any better. Bytecode interpreter rendering is that of Ubuntu, I don't really see the need to infringe.

Re: when is anoncvs.kde.org to work properly again?
Von: Pavel Troller
An: kde-devel@kde.org
Datum: Heute 18:18:36
> Lo,
>
> See subject line. Is anoncvs.kde.org to work properly again any time
> soon, or should I switch to a mirror?
>
Hi!
I'm afraid that mirrors are not updated as well because rsync.kde.org
is now the same machine as anoncvs.kde.org and it is dead (not fully down,
it pings, but services are dead - Dirk wrote me personally, that there
is a problem with the network services and that the machine must be
physically rebooted, which probably still didn't happen :-( :-(.
It's sad that just in the time of last fixes for 3.1, non-developing
testers (i.e. which don't have a real CVS account at cvs.kde.org) are
cut off and can't test.
With regards, Pavel Troller

Does this also include the cvsup server? AFAIK it has not been updated for a long time (>2 weeks) and I would love to report some bugs. Unfortunately I don't want to do that without a recent cvs(up).
Thanks in advance.

it probably is, since I'm running kde-3.1_rc3.
You might use gdialog instead (it is normally included in gnome-1.4/gnome-2.x)
You could also check out the kde-base CVS version and try to get kdialog to work.
(you will probably have to fix up some Makefiles to get it to work with kde-3.0.5,
but I'm pretty sure the actual code does not depend on kde-3.1 explicitely)

No it's not KDE3.1-specific. You might have to download it as seperapte application (RPM). At least for SuSE there is a package kdialog.rpm, which is not in the default-kde. I am using this with 3.0 i think it was already present in 2.x.
Sebastian

Make sure all the invoked executables are coming from
your $(QTDIR)/bin and all linked libraries are from
$(QTDIR)/lib, where $(QTDIR) is the directory that
holds your latest-greatest QT distribution.
You may have leftover bin and lib
files from previous QT distributions that's confusing
the current installation process of QT.
(do a 'which moc' and 'which uic' to see if they
are indeed coming from $(QTDIR)/bin)

I tried to compile qt 3.3.3 and got the same message. Some investigaion showed that the uic utility was compiled with -rpath pointing to the new installation directory. The latter is empty because I did not have a chance to install anything yet. So, it picked some library from my LD_LIBRARY_PATH. When I changed the LD_LIBRASRY_PATH to point to the build directory, everything started working OK.